BarryBarry Say says: | Bernard Hill wrote on 29 Jul 2003 | | > ... We are talking about | > | > .... | ..... | .... | .... :| | > .... | ..... | .... | .... :| | > | > which is ambiguous. And should maybe be | > | > .... | ..... | .... | .... :| | > |:.. | ..... | .... | .... :| | > | | In British traditional music as notated for at least the past half century, this form is not | ambiguous but rather normal notation for 4 bars repeated followed by 4 bars | repeated. I can see that this has limitations, but it presents a simple, elegant and | traditional notation, and I am loathe to move away from this as it would make old | manuscripts and publications less comprehensible. I know that other cultures have | different conventions in this area, and I think that both forms should be admissable. | | Music notation is based on convention, and happily there is no absolute way of | notating music, thus allowing development of interpretation.
Yup. And we might notice that, for a music formatter, one possible approach is to just display something that matches the input. Interpreting it is Someone Else's Problem. But an abc player program does have a problem, because it needs to decide how to interpret such things. The obvious thing is a heuristic that infers the missing repeat. In the above case, this is fairly simple, but it's easy to construct cases that would probably fool a program. Also, I wonder about the claim that the above first form is common in "British" music. I've seen it often enough. But I've seen a lot that do is something slightly subtler, using a bare ':' without the usual fat bar line at the left end of the second section. This can be a bit difficult to spot, needless to say. Checking some books on my shelf, I see that Tom Anderson's "Hand me doon da fiddle" follows the first of the above styles. There are never any bars (single or double) or repeat signs at the left edge of a staff. In Mel Bay's (very nicely done) reprint of Ryan's Mammoth Collection, flipping it open I note that on page 37, 5 of the 7 tunes indicate a repeat by a bare ':' at the left edge. On other pages, you see a thin-fat double bar before the repeat colon. So Ryan wasn't very consistent. I also have CRE 1-5 at hand. Here, each volume formats the music differently. In vol.1, they solve the repeat problem by never starting any section after the first at the left edge. In vol.2, they do something rather curious: Only the first staff has a clef, and the rest start with a bar line (which is fat-thin for the start of a new section). Then comes the key signature. If the section is repeated, a ':' comes after the key sig. For tunes in D, that little ':' often nearly disappears against the two sharps. Similar "interesting" notation is used in other books on my bookshelf. And part of the confusion is indicated by the frequent comment here that repeats should go back to the preceding double bar. This implies that a lot of people think that a double bar is a repeat symbol. But, at least in the above two cases, this is clearly not true. And in general, it's the colon that is the repeat symbol. It will usually be after a double bar, true, but the double bar marks a phrase boundary, not a repeat boundary. And some publishers like to separate the colon from the preceding double bar, producing a rather insignificant little ':' next to the key signature. In Ryan's case, the p.37 examples do have a double bar before the repeat colon - at the end of the preceding staff. This may have been the origin of that perverse :|!: example that we saw recently. If the ! means "new staff", this would exactly match what Ryan did. In any case, it's pretty clear that publishers' notation and people's interpretation of repeats are both far from standardized. No matter what we do or say, people will type the abc that looks like their own (mis)interpretation of any supposed standard. Printed music doesn't much work as a guideline, because it is so varied, and people can say "Look, these books do it that way, so it must be standard". People writing abc players have a problem ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
